An Egyptian government agent was arrested this Thursday in New York for espionage activities in the United States that included the monitoring of fellow opponents in the United States, according to the US Department of Justice.
Pierre Girgis, 39, had been operating in the country since at least 2018 and risks a sentence of up to ten years in prison for acting as a foreign agent without notifying the Attorney General’s Office, something that the Department of Justice considers especially serious.
Girgis was discovered when he contacted another Egyptian agent -this second with recognized status- through an encrypted messaging application on at least two occasions and the second instructed him on with whom within the different Egyptian agencies he could share the information that he owned.
By not being officially registered as a foreign agent, he could “act in the interests of his country and against those of the United States,” according to the deputy director of the FBI’s New York office.
“Our office will closely monitor compliance with foreign agent search standards, which is critical to ensuring our government is not under the secret influence of other governments,” said US Attorney Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York.